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1951
The winner is listed first, in CAPITAL letters.
Actor:
HUMPHREY BOGART in  "The
African Queen", Marlon Brando in "A
Streetcar Named Desire", Montgomery Clift in "A
Place in the Sun", Arthur Kennedy in "Bright Victory",
Fredric March in "Death of a Salesman"
Actress:
VIVIEN LEIGH in "A
Streetcar Named Desire", Katharine Hepburn in "The
African Queen", Eleanor Parker in "Detective Story",
Shelley Winters in "A Place in the Sun",
Jane Wyman in
"The Blue Veil"
Supporting Actor:
KARL MALDEN in "A
Streetcar Named Desire", Leo Genn in "Quo Vadis",
Kevin McCarthy in "Death of a Salesman", Peter Ustinov
in "Quo Vadis", Gig Young in "Come Fill the Cup"
Supporting Actress:
KIM HUNTER in "A
Streetcar Named Desire", Joan Blondell in "The
Blue Veil", Mildred Dunnock in "Death of a Salesman",
Lee Grant in "Detective Story", Thelma Ritter in "The
Mating Season"
Director:
GEORGE STEVENS for "A Place in the Sun",
John Huston for "The
African Queen", Elia Kazan for "A
Streetcar Named Desire", Vincente Minnelli for "An
American in Paris", William Wyler for "Detective
Story"
 Marking
the decline of the old Hollywood studio system, this was the first year
in which the Best Picture Oscar was given to the film's producers
rather than to the studio that released the film.
Director Vincente Minnelli's An
American in Paris, a lavish, Technicolor, Gershwin-scored
musical, was a major surprise winner of the Best Picture
Award in 1951. (The Arthur Freed-produced film with eight
nominations won a total of six Oscars including Best Picture,
Best Story and Screenplay - Alan Jay Lerner, Best Color
Cinematography, Best Color Art Direction, Best Color Costume
Design, and Best Score for a Musical Picture. In addition,
it was presented with the Thalberg Award for producer Arthur
Freed, and an Honorary Oscar was presented to virtuoso
Gene Kelly.
The film was about an ex-GI painter who remained
in Paris following the war, and became enmeshed in a romantic
triangle between a rich American patroness (Nina Foch) and
a lovely 19 year-old French dancer (Leslie Caron). It was the first musical
to win the Best Picture award since The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Broadway
Melody (1928-9), the first color film to win an Oscar since Gone
With The Wind (1939), and one of only a few Best Picture
winners that received no acting nominations.
The Best Picture film winner marked a major upset.
It was up against stiff competition from two black and white
melodramas (which had a total of nineteen nominations between
them, 12 and 7 respectively):
- director Elia Kazan's film adaptation of a
Tennessee Williams play about a neurotic Southern belle who
visits her sister and brother-in-law in New Orleans - A
Streetcar Named Desire (with twelve nominations and
four wins)
- director George Stevens' film based on Theodore
Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy, A
Place in the Sun (with seven nominations and six
wins - Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best B/W Cinematography,
Best Dramatic Score, Best Film Editing, and Best B/W Costume
Design), about an ambitious factory worker (Montgomery Clift)
who aspires to a more glamorous life with a gorgeous debutante
(Elizabeth Taylor), but is threatened by a lower-class co-worker's
(Shelley Winter) pregnancy and a false accusation of murder
The remaining nominees included the most expensive
film of its time - MGM's big budget epic version of Henryk
Siekiewicz's classic novel and director Mervyn LeRoy's film Quo
Vadis (with a total of eight nominations and no wins) about
Nero's Christian persecution and starring Deborah Kerr and
Robert Taylor, and 20th Century Fox's and director Anatole
Litvak's WWII thriller Decision Before Dawn (with a
weak total of two nominations and no wins). Quo Vadis had
the dubious distinction of not winning in any of the
categories in which it was nominated. It was thought that the
two front-runners Streetcar and A Place in the Sun split
the vote, thereby handing the victory to the MGM musical.
The Best Director category included five major
film directors:
The entire acting ensemble in A
Streetcar Named Desire (most of whom had performed
in the Broadway stage cast) was nominated for Best Actor/Actress
and Best Supporting Actor/Actress awards (Marlon Brando,
Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, and Kim Hunter), and three of
the four succeeded and were presented with awards. [It
was the first film ever to win three Acting Oscars.]
Twenty-seven year-old front-runner Marlon Brando
(with his first of eight career nominations) was competing
for Best Actor for his second film performance (he had debuted
a year earlier in The Men) as the animalistically-brutish,
abusive Stanley Kowalski (Kim Hunter's wife and Vivien Leigh's
brother-in-law). Method actor Brando lost the hotly-contested
contest to long-deserving Humphrey Bogart (with his second
of three career nominations - and his sole career Oscar
win) for his role as gin-loving, earthy skipper Charlie Allnut
in director John Huston's The
African Queen (with four nominations and one win -
Bogart's Best Actor honor). Many interpreted Bogart's win as
a payback award, and as a "career"
Oscar (since he had been passed over for major film nominations
or wins - including his many un-nominated roles in The
Maltese Falcon (1941), To Have
and Have Not (1944), The
Big Sleep (1946), and The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)). [Bogart's first
nomination was for Casablanca
(1943), and he would be nominated one more time for playing
paranoid Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny
(1954). Interestingly, Brando and Bogart were both nominated
again in 1954, but this time, Brando won the Oscar for On
the Waterfront (1954).] Bogart's win in 1951 was an upset,
since it denied the predicted clean-sweep for the cast of A
Streetcar Named Desire, and a much-deserved Oscar for Brando.
The other Best Actor nominees in the competitive
category included:
- Montgomery Clift (with his second of four
unsuccessful nominations) as doomed George Eastman - a poor
boy who falls in love with rich girl Elizabeth Taylor, but
is threatened by dowdy factory co-worker Shelley Winters
and her pregnancy in A Place in the
Sun
- Fredric March (with his fifth and last Oscar
nomination - he had won twice before in 1931-2 and 1946)
as aging, unsuccessful salesman Willy Loman in director Laslo
Benedek's film adaptation of Arthur Miller's play Death
of a Salesman (with five nominations and no wins)
- Arthur Kennedy (with his second of five unsuccessful
career nominations) as Larry Nevins - a veteran made blind
in WWII combat in director Mark Robson's Bright Victory (with
two nominations and no wins)
The Best Actress race was another formidable
race between Leigh and Hepburn:
- Katharine Hepburn (with her fifth out of a
career total of twelve nominations) was nominated for her
performance in The
African Queen as prim spinster/missionary Rose Sayer
(Bogart's boat companion aboard a 30-foot river steamboat
in German East Africa during World War I)
- Vivien Leigh's Oscar-winning role as the fragile,
genteel, tarnished, desperate, and aging Southern belle Blanche
DuBois who is mentally and physically abused by her brother-in-law
in A
Streetcar Named Desire. [It was Leigh's fifth film,
second Oscar win, and first nomination after her Oscar-winning
performance in Gone
With The Wind (1939). The other best-known films
she appeared in since 1939 included - Waterloo Bridge
(1940), That Hamilton Woman (1941), Caesar
and Cleopatra (1946), Anna Karenina (1947), The Roman
Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), and Ship of Fools (1965).
Both of Leigh's two Oscar wins were for playing Southern
belles.]
The other nominees were: Eleanor Parker (with
her second consecutive nomination out of a career total of
three unsuccessful nominations) as Mary McLeod (detective Kirk
Douglas' wife with a secret past) in Detective Story,
Shelley Winters (with her first of four career nominations)
as pregnant factory worker Alice Tripp in A
Place in the Sun, and past Oscar-winner Jane Wyman
(with her third of four career nominations) as self-sacrificing
nanny-nursemaid Louise in director Curtis Bernhardt's The
Blue Veil (with two nominations and no wins).
Karl Malden (with his first career nomination
and sole Oscar win) won the Best Supporting Actor award in
1951 for his reprised role (from Broadway) as Harold (Mitch)
Mitchell - a mother-dominated bachelor, Brando's card-playing
buddy, and Blanche du Bois' would-be suitor who eventually
abandons her in A
Streetcar Named Desire. The other Best Supporting Actor
nominees included:
- Leo Genn (with his sole career nomination)
as Roman nobleman Petronius in Quo Vadis
- Kevin McCarthy (with his sole career nomination)
as Willy Loman's son Biff in Death of a Salesman
- Peter Ustinov (with his first of three career
nominations) as mad Roman emperor Nero in Quo Vadis
- Gig Young (with his first of three career
nominations) as wealthy alcoholic Boyd Copeland in director
Gordon Douglas' Come Fill the Cup (the film's sole
nomination)
Kim Hunter (with her sole career nomination
and sole Oscar win) won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for
her reprised Broadway performance as Stella Kowalski (Marlon
Brando's wife and Vivien Leigh's younger sister) in A
Streetcar Named Desire. The remaining four nominees
in the category included:
- Joan Blondell - in her long career - received
her sole Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for
her role as aging musical actress Annie in The Blue Veil
- Mildred Dunnock (with her first of two unsuccessful
career nominations) as Linda (Willy Loman's wife) in Death
of a Salesman
- Lee Grant (with her first of four career nominations
- for her debut film role) as an eccentric shoplifter in Detective
Story
- Thelma Ritter (with her second of six unsuccessful
nominations) as mother-in-law/servant Ellen McNulty in director
Mitchell Liesen's The Mating Season (the film's sole
nomination)
The Best Foreign picture (receiving an Honorary
Award) was director Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon - it was
also the first post-war Japanese film to be shown widely
in the West and to attract attention, and it made Kurosawa's
favorite actor, Toshiro Mifune, a world famous star. Virtuoso
dancer, film actor, singer, director and choreographer Gene
Kelly received an Honorary Academy Award "in appreciation
of his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer,
and specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art
of choreography on film."
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
Decision Before Dawn was a minor film
(and nominated for only two Oscars), but since it was supported
by Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, it appeared on the Best
Picture ballot. A number of films should have been nominated
for Best Picture in its place, but weren't. Independent studio
United Artists couldn't muster enough support to get its popular
and entertaining classic film The
African Queen nominated for Best Picture, although
their strong film candidate was nominated for Best Director
(John Huston), Best Actor (Humphrey Bogart), Best Actress (Katharine
Hepburn), and Best Screenplay (James Agee and John Huston).
Christian Nyby's and the Howard Hawks'-produced The Thing (From Another
World) was
completely un-nominated.
Director Alfred Hitchcock's and Warner Bros.'
superb psychological suspense thriller Strangers
on a Train went
un-nominated in all categories except Best Black and White
Cinematography. Robert Walker was snubbed for his great performance
as gay, psycho-pathic killer Bruno Antony, who murdered tennis
pro Guy Haines' (Farley Granger) estranged wife Miriam and
then demanded, through blackmail, the reciprocal murder of
his own tyrannical father.
One of the finest science-fiction films of all
time, Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still, missed
out on the nominations - although its message of peace brought
by an interplanetary traveller named Klaatu (Michael Rennie)
was a welcome relief.
There were at least three worthy Best Actor candidates
that weren't in the list of nominees:
- Kirk Douglas as belligerent, self-obsessed
unscrupulous, big-city newspaper reporter Charles "Chuck" Tatum
stuck in Albuquerque and looking for his 'ace in the hole'
big story in director/co-writer Billy Wilder's scathing Ace
in the Hole/The Big Carnival (with only one nomination
for Best Original Screenplay)
- Kirk Douglas (again) as obsessive Detective
James McLeod in William Wyler's Detective Story
- British actor Alastair Sim as miserly Ebenezer
Scrooge in the most definitive version of Dickens' story
- A Christmas Carol (with no nominations)
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